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PHP and PEAR vs. Ruby and Rails

I was sent a link to http://www.rubyonrails.com and I checked it out (if you haven't, check out their 15 min. 50 MB intro video). It is pretty amazing. With Ruby on Rails, as the movie shows, he created a complete blog system in 58 lines of code, which would take many more lines than that to do in PHP (if you want to debate this point, go ahead, but that's not the point of this discussion).

The language seems incredibly straightforward, powerful, and very fast because it is simple.

So, have many of you out there used Ruby for web programming in place of something that you could have done in PHP? How would you compare using PHP to using Ruby?

Would it be worth it to learn Ruby and use it as a first-choice for web programming? What are the drawbacks?

Is there a way in PHP that does what Rails does for Ruby, in that it makes programming more simple and fast and it takes care of redundancy? Perhaps I just haven't looked far enough, but does PEAR do this? --- allow for more rapid development and bundle commands for easy use?

I'm also really interested in this topic. Has anyone out there had a true "I've seen the light" experience? Are people really dropping PHP completely for RoR? It's a bit of a learning curve I think so I'd love to hear others' comments before diving in the deep end. Is it really THAT great? (coming from PHP)

I'm using Basecamp for a while now... Rails framwork was actually built upon it, and all I can say is - pretty much amazing. Haven't had time to grasp it so far, but IMO when it comes to RAD tools, RonR will have its piece of cake.

The only question is will success story of 37signals bring up critical mass of developers and applications to make it sustainable on OpenSource market...